Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Sunday, June 16, 2013

Syria - Appraisal of a Failed State

Not necessarily
in love, but certainly in the pursuit of peace, we start from the assumption
that the human desire for an easy life will eventually overcome all barriers.
The problem arises that many of our politicians are reluctant to view our
enemies as being sufficiently trustworthy as to be creditable negotiators. Yair
Lapid (currently Israel’s
Minister of Finance) summed this up when he stated in a Jewish
Chronicle interview (13th January 2012) that
“people have different needs and wants, and for the Palestinians their desire
to have their own version of nationalism is stronger than peace and love.”Sadly, as a general principle, this applies
to the Arab world.If we are not witnessing
the final disintegration of Syria
it won’t be because this regime is guided by national unity.

Logic does not always drive a regime’s
activities. The need to survive steers government behaviour and it is history that
informs the process.Arab history is
violent and built on a self-image of supremacy and right-to-rule.The disconnect between perception and truth is
at present, too wide to bridge, but also, discussion is rigidly defined through
what is culturally acceptable.

Hassan A Barari
wrote in his introduction to ‘Israelism - Arab Scholarship on Israel, a
critical assessment’ that “Writing on Israel has not been objective and has
been linked to the conflict prism, which has defined much of the epistemology (methodology
-me) and ontology (fundamental truths -me) of Israel studies in the Arab
World…”it was a solid way to confuse his
meaning and more simply it means that the conflict between Israel and its neighbours
is reinforced by Islamic imperialist and racialist attitudes.This intellectual malignancy is not
restricted to attitudes towards Israel.

Syria is ruled by The Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party of Syria and has been ruled
continuously by the Party, since the 1963 coup d’état which brought the Ba’athists
to power.The ideology is authoritarian
and expansionist.It views its borders
as being that of the resurrected ancient Syrian empire which would include
parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Egypt and all of Jordan, Lebanon and Israel. The
next largest party is the SSNP (Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party) which
according to Wikipedia seeks the establishment of a Syria “spanning the Fertile
Crescent, including present day Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine,
Cyprus, Kuwait, Sinai, south-eastern Turkey and south-western Iran...” It is instructive that non-Arab nations are
included in this melange against their will, and Israel
is Palestine!

This colonialist
ambition is both Arab and Islamic. It is truly astonishing that it is wholly absent
from any contemporary debate about regional instability afflicting this region
of the world.

Like all the Arab
regimes created through Franco-British collusion (after the collapse of the
Ottoman [Turkish] empire in 1917) Syria is an authoritarian kleptocracy
dependent on the goodwill of its partners for its survival. It is an unstable
amalgam of mutually intolerant ethnic and religious groups: The Alawite
minority put into power by France
in 1946 was groomed to be dependent on the assistance of others by the
precarious nature of its rule. The Alawites represent 12% of the total Syrian
population.They were positioned as the
nation’s military elite; hence a client-master military relationship was
cemented between France and Syria, and later, Russia
and Syria.

The Alawite
minority were dependent for their control of the nation on the good offices of
other interested parties. Christians (10%) and Kurds (9%) profited from their
relationship with the regime. Sunnis who make up the majority of the population
(about 74%) were kept in an uneasy and inferior position within society by the
active collaboration of the most powerful Sunni families. It is this mix that determined the successful
co-existence of the main groups based on the consensual terror of its Alawite
rulers.

The Sunni elite were
allowed their own share of the spoils of Alawite dictatorial rule.The leading Sunni clan that supported Assad
Senior in his rise to power was headed by Mustafa Abdul Qadir Tlass (former
minster for Defence). Foreign Minister Walid Muallem and Prime Minister
Al-Halqi are both Sunni’s.

But in July 2012
the Tlass family defected to Turkey.
They had formed the main pillar of Sunni support for the Alawite regime.It is doubtful Junior Assad could have
successfully taken control of Syria
without the patriarch, Mustafa Tlass, standing at his side (according to
Stratfor analysis).In the same month,
according to the newspaper Yediot Achranot “Syria:
8 signs that Assad is through,” 20 brigadier generals and colonels had defected
to Turkey
as had some 20,000 troops.Almost a year
later it was reported by Turkey's
state-run news agency that 73 Syrian military officers, including seven
generals and 20 colonels, had crossed the border into Turkey "seeking
refuge" with their families. They were taken to a refugee camp that houses
military officers who have defected from the Syrian army (Ynet news 15th June
2013).

President Assad lost
his brother-in-law to a killer who managed to infiltrate his closest protective
detail.Assef Shawkat was the officer
tasked with suppressing the civil war. He was assassinated along with two other
top Syrian government officials on July 18th 2012.

The internecine
conflict within Syria that
began in February 2011 has been complicated by Iraqi refugees (almost one and a
half million people adding a strain on the already weak Syrian economy) and the
intervention of Iran
on the side of the Alawite regime.

Why Iran? Iran is a Shiite
nation and Shias are despised by the majority Sunnis. Iran ‘accepts’ the Alawite with their
lapsed Shiite status, for now they forgive them, for the sake of Iranian geopolitical
influence they tolerate their ‘betrayal’ of Shiism.And if we then inject Iranian and through Iran, Lebanese
involvement into the conflict we create a momentum of escalating terror based
on al-Qaeda’s (Sunni) involvement. In February 2012 Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan
Nasrallah, in reference to the ongoing Syrian Civil War stated: “They have not
murdered six million people in Syria,
not half a million and not one thousand. Only a few people have lost their
lives.” Leaving aside the moral turpitude of the statement it is clear that Lebanon’s
undisputed Shiite ruler places no value on human life.

Nor are the Sunnis
so forgiving. In a recent statement Shaykh Yusuf Qaradawi, stationed in Qatar,
(majority Sunni) declared that the Alawite were worse than the infidel Jews. He
declared that an appropriate response would be to rid the world of all Alawite heretics. Iran,
which in the past has not been shy about interfering in Qatar (24% of its citizens are Shia), may not be
so well disposed towards Qatar
in the future.

In opposition to
Shiism, The al-Nusra Front or Jabhat al-Nusra is an offshoot of al-Qaeda.Their hatred for Alawites was undiminished
even before the ‘moderate’, highly influential Sunni Qaradawi spoke.So Muslim fighters, fresh from other Islamic conflicts
are pouring into Syria
in order to facilitate the end of the heretic regime.When we inject Lebanon’s
Hezbollah into Syria’s
conflict in order to boost the Alawite regimes chances for survival, the
potential for a blood-drenched future is increasing without pause.

And America’s contribution
to the bloodbath is at best foolhardy and at worse, madness. Shoshana Bryen of
the Centre for Security Policy could not have enunciated more clearly, the
foolishness of this move.The Muslim
world does not need to be taught how to kill – they know it very well – perhaps
better than we do. Therefore, to train them to kill using better weapons is simply
short-sighted.You don’t train people to
kill their brothers and cousins.They
will neither thank us for it, nor ominously, will they forget our benighted
generosity.